Scribbling on the fringes: Post-1950 Australian poetry

Abstract

In a 1992 special issue on poetry of Australia’s oldest literary journal, Southerly , the poet, editor and publisher Dane Thwaites writes, ‘The great and glorious art of poetry has been in recession, maybe even depression, for a long time, a century or more.’ Thwaites is not using the word ‘glorious’ ironically; he comes to praise Australian poetry, not to bury it. Thwaites goes on to say, ‘the fact is sales are so low that poetry books don’t usually pay their way … the general social irrelevance of poetry is profound’. Sixteen years later the situation had not changed. January 2008 saw the Weekend Australian publish articles on the subject by Mickey Pinkerton and Timoshenko Aslanides. Pinkerton argues that ‘Australian poetry clearly has an image problem’, having ‘lost its stature from days gone by when just about everybody could recite a few poems’. Aslanides argues for the creation of the post of Australian poet laureate, partly to ‘broaden the appreciation of poetry in Australian daily life’. This lament about poetry having become a minority art in terms of sales, money and public attention has recurred throughout the period since 1950, and it is a central fact about the place of poetry in Australian society today. As Thwaites notes, it is a ‘long time’ problem, but there is no doubt that it was intensified by the complexities introduced into poetry through the advent of modernism just after the Great War. It is not just a problem in Australia, but one that exists in most of the world.